Lauren Gunderson is a playwright, short story writer, teacher and actor. Her work has received national praise and awards including the Berrilla Kerr Award for American Theatre, Young Playwright's Award, Essential Theatre Prize, Virtual Theatre Prizes and many others. She was a finalist for the Chesterfield Screenwriting Award, the Princess Grace Award, the O'Neill National Playwrights Conference and the Heidmann Award for 10-minute plays. She has been produced off-Broadway (Parts They Call Deep), off-off Broadway (Sus Manos), in Atlanta (Leap and Background) andis finishing touring her play, Defy You, Stars (Alliance Theatre's Collision Project). Herplay Leap has just been published with Theatre Emory's Playwriting Center and herfirst collection of plays Deepen The Mystery: Science and the South Onstage waspublished with IUniverse this January. She has developed plays with Horizon Theatre, JAW/West in Portland, WORDBride, Brave New Works, Actor Express and others. She is an annual participant in Dad's Garage Theatre's 8 1/2 x 11 Festival. Her short story "Cancer/Dish" was recently awarded the Noremberga Short Fiction Award. She has spoken nationally and internationally on the intersection of science and theatre at conferences all over the world.

Mark Routhier (Director) Mark Routhier's Bay Area directing credits include The Bone Man of Benares, 70 Scenes of Halloween (Encore Theatre), Cartoon (Impact Theatre), someguy, Drunken Grownups, Iphigenia and Other Daughters (Mettle Theatre), Cowboy Mouth (MGTC), and Exit the King (Am. Citz. Theatre). His workshops include Carly Mensch's All Hail Hurricane Gordo (University Playwright's Workshop, Marin Theatre Co.), Eisa Davis's Bulrusher (SF Stage & Film), Marisa Wegrzyn's Hickorydickory and Rajiv Joseph's Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo (Magic Theatre). He also directed readings of Rick Mitchell's Brecht in L.A. and Michael Hollinger's Opus in the Harriet Lake Festival of New Plays at Orlando Shakes. His dramaturgy credits include Lucy Thurber's Monstrosity (Encore), Mike Geither's Stars Fell All Night (BAPF), Tim Lord's The Secret History of Caleb Caan (University Playwrights Workshop, Stanford). His short plays Spotter and Leaving premiered in Best of Playground and S.o.S.II at AlterTheatre, respectively. He is Director of Artistic Development at Magic Theatre, and serves on the Executive Committee of the National New Play Network (NNPN). He received his MFA in Dramatic Writing from NYU.

Risa Wechsler is an Assistant Professor of Physics at Stanford University, where she also works with the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology and Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. From 2003-2006, she was a Hubble Fellow with University of Chicago Astronomy & Astrophysics Department, an Enrico Fermi Fellow with Enrico Fermi Institute and an Institute Fellow with Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics. She received her Ph.D. and Masters degrees from UC Santa Cruz and her undergraduate degree in Physics from MIT.

Evren Odcikin’s (Director) Bay Area credits include Blood Wedding (Shotgun Players), The Greek Play (elastic future), Edge (Phoenix Theatre), Road to Mecca (Secondwind), Death of Yazdgerd (Darvag), and Heavy Days (Shotgun Lab Productions).  He has directed numerous readings and workshops at Magic Theatre, Golden Thread Productions, and TheatreFirst.  His set design credits include Beautiful (elastic future), Tesla’s White Pigeon Part One: Static (mugwumpin), ReOrient 2005 (Golden Thread Productions), and Water Principle (Shotgun Players).  He is an artistic associate at Magic Theatre, an associate artist with Golden Thread Productions, and a company member with elastic future (www.elasticfuture.com).  He is originally from Turkey and is a graduate of Princeton University.

Naomi Iizuka (Advisor) was born in Tokyo and raised in Japan, Indonesia, Holland, and Washington, D.C. Her work has been produced and developed throughout the United States. She has lived most recently in Iowa and California. Naomi is the recipient of a Whiting Award, a McKnight Fellowship, an NEA/TCG Artist-in-Residence Fellowship, Princeton’s Hodder Fellowship, a Jerome Fellowship, and a PEN Center USA West Award for Drama. She graduated from National Cathedral School in Washington, D.C., and received a B.A. from Yale University and an M.F.A. from the University of California-San Diego. Her plays include 36 Views, War of the Worlds, Language of Angels, Aloha, Say the Pretty Girls, Polaroid Stories, Skin and Tattoo Girl.

Dr. Dennis Clegg (Science Expert) earned his BS degree in biochemistry at the UC Davis in 1977 and his PhD in biochemistry at UC Berkeley in 1983, where he used emerging methods in recombinant DNA to study the sensory transduction systems of bacteria. As a Jane Coffin Childs Postdoctoral Scholar at UCSF, he studied neural development and regeneration. He has continued this avenue of research since joining the UCSB faculty in 1988. Dr. Clegg is the recipient of the UCSB Distinguished Teaching Award in the Physical Sciences, and has served on the editorial board of the Journal of Biological Chemistry. He is a member of the UCSB Neuroscience Research Institute, and is currently Chair of the Department of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology Department and Director of the UCSB Training Program in Stem Cell Biology.

A former newspaper staff reporter, Karla Jennings (Playwright) has been produced in Atlanta, Los Angeles and Off-Off-Broadway. Along with the Magic's Sloan commission for The Ruby Vector (The National Arts Club 2005 Playwrights First Award recipient, also selected for The Lark Theatre's
Playwrights' Week 2005), she has received an Ensemble Studio Theatre 2006 Sloan New Play Project (NP2) commission for a play on global warming, to be workshoped at Atlanta's Alliance Theatre. Her play Clay's War earned a biannual Hermann Kesten Fellowship for a July 2006 international writers' conference in Germany. The Ruby Vector grew out of a 2004 Georgia Tech DramaTech new play commission. Creative Loafing Arts Weekly rated her play Images in Smoke (Essential Theatre) among Atlanta's top 15 productions in 2000. She received their 2003 People's Choice Award for Best Local Playwright. She co-founded Atlanta's premiere playwriting organization, Working Title Playwrights, leading it for its first three years as Coordinator. She is a member of The Dramatists Guild and The Playwrights' Center. In addition to her staff reporting, her freelance science and medical articles and essays have been published in The New York Times, Newsday, Cosmopolitan, The Japan Times, The Journal of the American Medical Association and elsewhere. She's the author of a book on computer folklore, "The Devouring Fungus: Tales of the Computer Age" (W.W. Norton& Co., 1990) and two unpublished novels.

Mark Routhier (Director) Mark Routhier's Bay Area directing credits include The Bone Man of Benares, 70 Scenes of Halloween (Encore Theatre), Cartoon (Impact Theatre), someguy, Drunken Grownups, Iphigenia and Other Daughters (Mettle Theatre), Cowboy Mouth (MGTC), and Exit the King (Am. Citz. Theatre). His workshops include Carly Mensch's All Hail Hurricane Gordo (University Playwright's Workshop, Marin Theatre Co.), Eisa Davis's Bulrusher (SF Stage & Film), Marisa Wegrzyn's Hickorydickory and Rajiv Joseph's Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo (Magic Theatre). He also directed readings of Rick Mitchell's Brecht in L.A. and Michael Hollinger's Opus in the Harriet Lake Festival of New Plays at Orlando Shakes. His dramaturgy credits include Lucy Thurber's Monstrosity (Encore), Mike Geither's Stars Fell All Night (BAPF), Tim Lord's The Secret History of Caleb Caan (University Playwrights Workshop, Stanford). His short plays Spotter and Leaving premiered in Best of Playground and S.o.S.II at AlterTheatre, respectively. He is Director of Artistic Development at Magic Theatre, and serves on the Executive Committee of the National New Play Network (NNPN). He received his MFA in Dramatic Writing from NYU.

Raymond A. Zilinskas (Science Expert), Ph.D. is the Director of the Chemical and Biological Weapons Nonproliferation Program at Center for Nonproliferation Studies. His research focuses on achieving effective biological arms control, assessing the proliferation potential of the former Soviet Union's biological warfare program and meeting the threat of bioterrorism. He serves a long-term consultant at the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA) for which he carried out studies on Cuban allegations of U.S. biological attacks against its people, animals and plants and investigations carried out by the United Nations of chemical warfare in Southeast Asia and the Arabian Gulf region. Dr. Zilinskas is also a consultant to the U.S. Department of Defense and has participated in two warfare-related inspections in Iraq (June and October 1994). He holds a BA in Biology from California State University at Northridge with a BA in Biology and a Filosofie Kandidat in Organic Chemistry from University of Stockholm and a Ph.D. from the University of Southern California.